Public Administration in an Open Innovation Model as Exemplied by the “Social Innovation” Programme

In this article, I present the process of defining, creating and implementing innovation by the public administration sector, its crucial element being opportunities for involving public administration in social change of scale. Open innovation could be one of the tools in this kind of approach. Open innovation introduced by public administration and inducing social change should involve five basic principles: cooperation, knowledge sharing, coherence, interdependence, and openness.
In the article, I deal with foreign experiences with the implementation of the open innovation approach by public administration. It should be mentioned that in other countries and institutions there already exist public programmes such as NESTA and the Red Tape Challenge (United Kingdom), MEPIN (Scandinavian countries), Simplex (Portugal), E-Procurement (Lithuania), INNOBAROMETR (European Commission) and European Public Sector Innovation Scoreboard (implemented since 2011). In Poland, the “Social innovation” programme has been implemented since 2012. The National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR), which is responsible for this initiative, has implemented two editions of the scheme so far. On the basis of the above facts, I discuss the exante evaluation and the effects of the two competition editions. In conclusion, I analyse the effects of these actions in the context of initiating innovative social changes.

In this article, I present the process of defining, creating and implementing innovation by the public administration sector, its crucial element being opportunities for involving public administration in social change of scale. Open innovation could be one of the tools in this kind of approach. Open innovation introduced by public administration and inducing social change should involve five basic principles: cooperation, knowledge sharing, coherence, interdependence, and openness.
In the article, I deal with foreign experiences with the implementation of the open innovation approach by public administration. It should be mentioned that in other countries and institutions there already exist public programmes such as NESTA and the Red Tape Challenge (United Kingdom), MEPIN (Scandinavian countries), Simplex (Portugal), E-Procurement (Lithuania), INNOBAROMETR (European Commission) and European Public Sector Innovation Scoreboard (implemented since 2011). In Poland, the “Social innovation” programme has been implemented since 2012. The National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR), which is responsible for this initiative, has implemented two editions of the scheme so far. On the basis of the above facts, I discuss the exante evaluation and the effects of the two competition editions. In conclusion, I analyse the effects of these actions in the context of initiating innovative social changes.